How salient is the identity of engineering students? on the use of the Engineering Student Identity Survey

Pierrakos, Olga; Curtis, Nicholas A.; Anderson, Robin

doi:10.1109/fie.2016.7757709

Cited by 17 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Pierrakos, Curtis, and Anderson 17 have also proposed a different measure of engineering identity from a psychological perspective. They developed items measuring multiple dimensions of engineering identity based on a thorough literature review and results from their prior work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Cross-sectional Study of Engineering Identity During Undergraduate Education

Godwin

Lee

2017 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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In this research paper, we explore engineering students' identity development across the four or more years of undergraduate engineering education. The focus of this work is subject-related role identities, or how students position themselves and are positioned by others as the kind of people that engage in engineering, mathematics, or physics. We collected responses from 586 engineering students at a large, public East Coast university using an electronic survey during the spring semester of 2016. Survey items were taken from previously developed instruments and included measures of students' interest in engineering, students' feeling of recognition by others as an engineer, and students' beliefs about their performance/competence in engineering. We also measured students' overall attitudes about their identities as a physics person, math person, and engineer. Student responses were compared by academic year at the university (i.e., first year, second year, third year, or fourth or more year) using ANOVA and post-hoc Tukey's HSD for significant results. Our findings illustrate differences in students' engineering performance/competence and recognition beliefs as well as differences in their engineering, mathematics, physics overall identity measures. The post-hoc Tukey's HSD tests reveal a consistent pattern of identity development with lower identification in the second year of engineering education and identification progressing to the highest levels in the fourth year. This research provides evidence that these subject-related role identity measures can be used with students across undergraduate engineering and that they can differentiate among students by year at a university. IntroductionIdentity is an important indicator for educational and professional outcomes that are important in engineering education [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8] . In this work, we define identity not only as how a student sees him or herself but also how he or she is positioned by others in the world 9 . These two tensions interplay in the context of engineering and how undergraduate students become engineers.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Cross-sectional Study of Engineering Identity During Undergraduate Education

Godwin

Lee

2017 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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“…The E-SIS consists of 38 items representing multiple approaches to measuring identity based on social and identity role theory literature. Sections below briefly review these approaches and Pierrakos, et al (2016) provide an explanation of each approach.…”

Section: How Is Identity Defined In This Study?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Through this process, experts in engineering education and social psychology were recruited to write appropriate items for the measure. An initial large pool of items was revised and reduced to the current set of 38 based on expert consensus (Pierrakos et al, 2016). Through this process, 11 subscales were created, each containing at least 3 items, believed to represent distinctiveness, visibility of affiliation, participation, citizenship, unified self-concept, interest, sense of belonging, attitudes, self-enhancement, social-support, and in-group cooperation.…”

Section: The Engineering Student Identity Scalementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Using the psychological literature as a guide, researchers (Pierrakos , Curtis & Anderson, 2016;Pierrakos, Casto, Curtis, Pappas & Anderson, 2017) developed the Engineering Student Identity Scale (E-SIS). The E-SIS consists of 38 items representing multiple approaches to measuring identity based on social and identity role theory literature.…”

Section: How Is Identity Defined In This Study?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Engineering Student Identity Scale (E-SIS) (Pierrakos et al, 2016;Pierrakos et al, 2017) was created to address the gap in identity literature specific to engineering students. The E-SIS was created through a deductive method (Smith, Fischer, & Fister, 2003).…”

Section: The Engineering Student Identity Scalementioning

confidence: 99%

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The Engineering Student Identity Scale: A Structural Validity Evidence Study

Curtis¹,

Pierrakos²,

Anderson³

2017 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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Nick Curtis serves at the lead student assessment consultant to academic programs at James Madison University, providing assistance to programs in all stages of assessment including using the results for meaningful student learning improvement. He works on several cross-disciplinary teams including with Olga Pierrakos, of the JMU Engineering program and Robin Anderson, of the JMU graduate psychology program. He received his master's and educational specialist degrees in school psychology and is currently pursuing a doctorate in Assessment and Measurement. AbstractResearchers have theorized that having a strongly developed identity as an engineering student contributes to persistence within engineering. Even so, there are no empirically supported measures of engineering student identity. The purpose of this study was to provide structural validity evidence for one such measure, the Engineering Student Identity Scale (E-SIS). This paper explores findings and implications of multiple investigations into the structure of the E-SIS. The data collected in this study do not support the current interpretations of the E-SIS as a unified measure of identify with 11 subscales derived from multiple approaches to measuring identity. The results do provide important information regarding revising the E-SIS to align more with fewer subscales and to focus exclusively on items that are directly affected by identity.

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